Tips

Even though contextual menus are largely useful when using a mouse or trackpad, sometimes they can be convenient to activate when navigating or managing your computer with the keyboard. For some operating systems like Microsoft Windows, you can press a contextual menu keyboard button to activate the system's contextual menu on a selection of items and copy them, send them via e-mail, or otherwise manipulate them.

Unfortunately, OS X does not support an option to activate the contextual menu without using the pointer. The menu in this operating system is linked directly to pointer's location, so even if … Read more

One of the relatively hidden but often invaluable features of OS X is its support for services, which is when one application can provide a function or capability to another, and accept some input such as text, files, or images, and perform a separate task with this data.

For instance, if you are in Safari and wish to send a selection of text to a friend in an e-mail, you can click and drag to highlight it, and then use a service to create a new e-mail that contains this text. Likewise, you can select text in Word, Pages, TextEdit, … Read more

When you boot OS X or attach a hard drive, the system will automatically try to mount any available volumes so you can access or format them for use. However, there may be times when you don't wish this to happen.

For example, if you have a dual-boot setup such as OS X 10.7 on one partition and OS X 10.8 on another, then you may wish to prevent one boot volume from being easily modified and perhaps corrupted when you are in the other operating system.

To do this, you will need to make use of … Read more

OS X Daily has recently unearthed a neat trick in OS X, that enables you to easily pause and resume running processes. This can be beneficial, especially when troubleshooting a program you are running that's taking quite a bit of CPU power and bogging down the rest of the system. Instead of quitting the program, you might simply like to pause it for a short while.

One of the commands in the Terminal is the "kill" command, which is commonly used to force-quit a running process by its process ID (PID).

In addition to "kill," … Read more

If you use an external disk drive with OS X, you may notice that when it is mounted, it becomes available for all users on the system. Therefore, if you have files you have saved to a USB drive and you attach it to your system and you switch user accounts, those files will be viewable within the second account.

In addition, if you have network file sharing enabled, the files on this drive will be accessible to any user who logs in via the network.

This behavior may seem a bit concerning, especially for those who have set up … Read more

I've actually lost track of all the iOS devices I have. From iPhones to iPads and iPods, there are a few generations of mobile Apple gadgets populating my home that are occasionally adopted or abandoned by my wife and kid.

For the most part, today's iOS devices are self-supporting. They get their updates directly, and purchased media can be downloaded and redownloaded without hassles that used to come with Apple's iTunes-focused, obnoxiously DRM-wrapped early days of iOS.

But what do you do when your kid wants you to load your Led Zeppelin bootlegs onto his iPad? Or … Read more

If you're anything like me, you have an iTunes library you've amassed over the course of many years, one that includes everything from ripped CDs to Amazon MP3 purchases to song downloads from any number of outside sources.

In other words, it's a messy collection, with duplicates, missing album art and tags, and so on. There are plenty of utilities out there promising to clean things up, but most of them will cost you.

Not today. Until tomorrow, you can get Leawo Tunes Cleaner (PC/Mac) absolutely free. There's a slightly obnoxious catch, but ultimately it'… Read more

It comes up again and again: "Steve, please recommend a great speaker." Good question, but there are a lot of factors to consider before coming up with a definitive answer. A lot depends on what you're looking for and how you define "great." Nailing down the price is the first step, but if there's one thing I've learned about audiophiles, it's that taste always plays a big part in evaluating sound quality. That's why, in my reviews, I describe how a speaker sounds with different kinds of music.

There's no … Read more

If your kid is using an iPhone, iPod, or iPad to blast music at unsafe levels, you should consider setting a limit on their maximum volume. I mean, they'll hate you for it -- but they'll also hate having tinnitus in their 20s, right?

In the above video, I'll walk you through the steps of lowering the maximum volume limit on any iOS device, as well as locking that setting in place using a password of your choosing.

If the video doesn't appear above, try going directly to the video on CNET TV or pay a … Read more